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Study: Blacks, Hispanics wait longer to vote

Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old woman from Miami who waited more than six hours last year to cast her ballot, was hailed by President Obama in his State of the Union Address earlier this year and cited as a

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Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old woman from Miami who waited more than six hours last year to cast her ballot, was hailed earlier this year by President Obama in his State of the Union Address. He cited her case as a reason why voting needs to be made easier.

Although Victor's case may be an extreme, a new study published in the Journal of Law and Politics found that minorities wait longer than other voters.

African-American voters waited an average of 23 minutes to vote last year compared with 12 minutes for whites, according to the study by Charles Stewart III, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hispanics waited an average of 19 minutes, Stewart found.

"At the individual level, the factor that stands out is race," Stewart wrote. "The preliminary analysis is that the differences are due to factors associated with where minority voters live, rather than with minority voters as individuals."

Stewart found that voters in Florida last year waited an average of 40 minutes to cast their ballots, compared with a two-minute wait for voters in Vermont. Overall, two-thirds of voters waited less than 10 minutes to vote while 3% waited more than an hour.

Obama created a bipartisan commission last month, headed by veterans of his campaign and that of his GOP rival Mitt Romney, to study ways to make voting easier and more efficient. The commission's report is due later this year.